Friday, February 6, 2009

Picture Captions from Spain

Now that I am back on a keyboard that I can type on, I thought I would make little comments on the pictures I posted from Spain. The pictures aren't in any order of what I did on the trip because I was just trying to get stuff up in a random little internet cafe in Morocco (5 dirhams for an hour of slow internet, but it was only 5 dirhams, which is about 65 cents)

1. This is a side view of the Palacio Royal in Madrid. This is a 2800-room castle is the official residence of the King of Spain, though he doesn't actually live there. My friends and I went just as sun was setting so we only saw the outside, but it was still beautiful and enormous. If I look straight ahead from where I took this picture, there is a beautiful palace garden.

2. This is the Cadiz Cathedral. The ship landed in Cadiz, Spain and we had about 4 hours to walk around before our train to Madrid left. For 3 euros, we walked up to the tower on the right side which gives you an amazing 360 degree view of the city. To get up to the top there were only stairs at the end; before that it was an incline, which made us more tired than we thought.

3. This is a picture of the center part of the Plaza de Espana, in Sevilla, Spain (which was the third city we went to after Cadiz and Madrid). We kind of stumbled upon this place, but it was quite a find. It was built for the 1929 World Fair and now serves as a government building. From this center part comes out two huge buildings that wrap around to form a half circle. It was impossible to get far enough away to take a picture of the whole thing, but at night it was a beautiful sight, especially with the huge, lit fountain in the middle.

4. This picture is sideways, but I didn't want to load it again, but you can get the idea. This is a picture of my friend Jill and I in El Retiro, which is a huge park (kind of like Central Park) in the Middle of Madrid. Jill is a junior Boston University and we met once last semester and are becoming quite good friends on the ship. We are planning on traveling together at most of the ports.

5. This is a picture of one of the pieces of the art installation we found while wandering through El Retiro. There were about 5 of these mirror balls with other metal sticks coming out of them in this glass and tile building. The whole thing was very cool and a closeup of one of these is my desktop background on my computer right now.

6. Repeat of #4 that I didn't want to delete.

7. This is a picture of my traveling group in Spain (though we were added be another friend later that day, but didn't end up getting a group shot then). The other girl is Jill, and the two boys are Conor and Ben, who we met along with most of the other people we hang out with, the first night at our hotel in the Bahamas. They both go to Syracuse University and were friends before this (and aren't big smilers in pictures, as you can see). We also travelled with them and two other girls in Morocco (more on that later). We all get along well, and have a similar style of travel, which is to not plan too much and kind of go on an adventure. 


That's all for now, I'll be posting an entry about Morocco in the next couple of days, though I may not get a chance to upload Morocco photos until South Africa, since I will be gone on a Safari almost the whole time in Namibia, and I can't imagine that their internet would be particularly speedy anyway.

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